It pays to be skeptical about experts who assert whatever is most acceptable to their peers or their paymasters.

Who Lies Sleeping?

The Psychology of Christianity 1.4

The Other World

Abstract

Why do millions of people want to believe in gods, and what does it do to them? Those are the questions the psychology of religion has to answer. Apologists always overlook any facts that seem to discredit their religious belief, making apology the opposite of scientific enquiry, the art of excusing. Scientific study must be based on testing. Armchair theologizing is not scientific. Sociology and social psychology have to depend on observation, though this can be enhanced by using mass observation, questionnaires and statistics, and individual beliefs can be studied in depth through psychiatry and examination of subjective religious experiences, including the stimulation of religious feeling by drugs and by physical means. The psychology of Christianity in society, particularly in the USA.

Annex—The Other World

The notion of another world is very old. Duality is an ancient religious idea, but one which was first treated philosophically around the time of the Iranian incursions into the world of the Greeks, evidently impressed by the philosophy behind the dualistic religion of the Persians—Zoroastrianism. From an intuition of the duality of Nature, religions have built an amazing phantasmagoria—the spirit world—entirely speculatively, and have fossilized it in dogma. Now they refuse to look at more serious and better founded attempts to do what they failed to do.

The early scientist, Thales of Miletus, a city shortly to be subjected by the Persians, had the hypothesis that the underlying world was made entirely of water, one of the four elements, water, air, earth and fire, recognized then. It was an idea possibly inspired by the Babylonian water god and god of life, Ea or Iah, but also justified by observation. The forms that water took on besides its own appeared as earth, air, and fire. Mixtures of these elements made the variety of things we find in Nature. In modern terms, Thales was saying that water appeared in different phases, and mixtures of the phases produced the other elements. Water in fact appears as a solid phase, ice, identified as earth, and as a vapour phase, steam, identified as air, and perhaps fire when hot. So the idea was not stupid.

Heraclitus said the world was made of fire, another of the four ancient elements. The world was constantly in flux, just like fire. Democritus said that nothing was solid because the world was made of atoms. Anaximenes thought air was the basic substance of the world, Anaximander thought it was a boundless substance that reminds us of space-time, a remarkable thought for the time. Plato decided that the real world was the world of forms or ideas, perfect originals of the imperfect copies that appear in the natural world. This world is akin to shadows projected from the “real” world of forms on to a wall, and the shadows on the wall are all that we can see. The world of perfect forms sounded like heaven to Christians who decided that Plato was one of them, so they took over Platonism as their philosophy.

Later western philosophers regarded the material world as the world of appearance or phenomena, behind or below which was a “real” world or a world of noumena. From this, some concluded that the world was not real, it was an illusion in the mind of the observer. Bishop Berkeley went so far as to reject a phenomenological world entirely. Locke had accepted the phenomenological world as self-evident, but acknowledged that all we knew of it was the impressions it left on our senses formed into ideas in our heads. Berkeley therefore claimed that only the ideas were real and offered no evidence for any outside reality. If there were nothing outside the ideas could still be there.

One trouble is that if all is illusion, there is no motive for doing anything including worshipping God who is part of the illusion and therefore just as arbitrary. We might as well enjoy it as if it were a good film or videogame, drinking, chasing women, gambling, and generally being hedonistic. After all, it is all a dream, right? The Christian cannot logically dissolve reality and remain a Christian. The world has to be real even for a Christian, but it is not the best of worlds. That is the world to come, and it is more real than the real world!

If nothing existed to stimulate our senses, where would our ideas come from? Locke had distinguished ideas of sensation and ideas of reflexion. Hume distinguished respectively impressions and ideas. With no impressions there could be no ideas. Kant accepted the same, calling them respectively particulars and concepts. But some concepts were not based on the direct perception of our senses, and Kant called them categories. They are ways of structuring our impressions of the world, but not, he believed, derived from it. Rather the brain imposed them on to the impressions received from the phenomenological world. The mind has developed these structures that it imposes on to its perceptions of the world to understand them. The implication is that the world must exist, must be real, for otherwise there could be no such structures. They would have no purpose. Any object in the world unstructured by mental categories Kant called the “thing in itself”. The world as we perceive it suitably structured, is the world of phenomena.

In the light of Darwin, we can appreciate that the mental categories have evolved over the aeons as life has evolved. They do depend on the outside world contrary to Kant’s belief, but the dependence has grown to be an instinct over millions of years. They necessarily match the real world because, by evolving, they gave animals an advantage over those without them. Perception worked better and these creatures survived better. The structures are therefore innate, not conscious, having evolved before consciousness did.

The observations of different observers show that they are observing the same phenomena. That is what science does, and goes on to use its observations in the world of appearances to get at the underlying world of laws and causes. So, ancient philosophy, ancient religion, and modern science agree that the world can be interpreted as being dual. Schopenhauer saw the world as dual, consisting of the physical world, and the world of the will, this latter equating with Kant’s world of noumena. He considered that will to live was the cause of human suffering. The world of the will was the subliminal urge of the self to survive and is a universal urge, only divided by self. So it is the division of will by self that causes conflict and suffering, and by overcoming self, a cosmic unity can be glimpsed—a kinunity! It is this that mystics take to be a vision of God or paradise.

Schopenhauer thought that denial of will, denial of Nature in effect, was the only way to stop suffering, and, because humans were rational, reason should offer a way of doing it. However, agreement is only ever reached in the grave, as Josif Stalin put it, so, with some justification, Schopenhauer, as a student of Hinduism and the perpetual pessimist, concluded annihilation—Nirvana—was the only way that will would be removed. It echoes the Christian notion of the End of the World, which came through Judaism from Persian Zoroastrianism. God would end the sinful world and judge its inhabitants living and dead, condemning some to permanent death by throwing them into a supernatural fire, while others would enjoy an everlasting life of bliss in the kingdom of God. Thus the will to live would end forever, and the world would be restored to a prehistoric timeless paradise that had been spoiled by the Evil Spirit inventing time. In reality, it is extinction of the species, the world continuing with no knowledge of time because there would be no thinking animals left in it. They, of course, would have the will to live still, but not being self-conscious, they would know nothing about it.

The basic idea of all this is that the world is not what it appears to be. There is an apparent world, and beneath it a “real” one. Science accepts that the world of appearance or phenomena that it studies has behind or beneath it an unperceived world. What we see when we look at the world is conditioned by our senses which are limited. So, the world is a world of appearance only. Like an animal that can see only shades and not colour, we might not be able to see things as they are, but that is not to say they are not there at all.

Today we know atoms are made up of protons and electrons, neutrons acting as if they were a combination of a proton and an electron. Different combinations of these make up the hundred or so elements we have, and combinations of these make up the millions of molecules that provide us with the rich tapestry of life. So the modern scientific idea is akin to the ancient ones. The world is not what it appears to be. Underneath the surface, it is more uniform—more united. This underlying world, the world behind the world of appearance can be very strange indeed—it is the world of quantum mechanics—but it cannot be anything we like. It must yield the world as we observe it, the world of appearance. We can discover about this underlying world by using science, by formulating hypotheses that have some consequences that we can observe, and then checking them out by observation and experiment.

Calling the world we live in, the world that is real to us, only an apparent world or world of appearances is absurd. It is our real world, and so it is real, not apparent, to us. Kant called the underlying level of laws and causes the noumenal level, a good name but not immediately obvious in meaning to modern people. Let us call it the “operational level” of the world. The operating level of the world, the world of laws and causes, of metaphorical cogs and levers, is not real but a world of our imagination, albeit bounded by reality, the world of phenomena.

The sad thing is that the old error of calling the operational world the real world has led to the devaluation of the world we actually live in and experience, and of Nature. This world is a vale of woe and is wicked. The proper place for us is heaven—a freely imagined place! Christians still think it. It is bizarre because it reverses everything quite contrary to all reason and direct experience. The imaginary is declared real and the real is declared an illusion. Today Moslems will unhesitatingly blow themselves up believing this world is an illusion and they will be going immediately to a better place that is real! Christians believe the same, even if they are not so convinced they want to do it.

Essentially the operating level can never be known. It can never be known, that is by direct observation. Our senses cannot directly perceive it. There will always have to be some scientific instrument or hypothesis between it and us. If the real world is one only of appearances because it is restricted by our senses, the underlying one is even more restricted. That is why any theory of it has to be corrigible. Essentially, to know the operational world depends upon our intellect, upon thought and reason. Whatever it is has to be deduced, and the deductions depend on observations that might be inexact, or subject to boundaries and limitations that are not immediately obvious. So, hypotheses have to be correctable, subject to revision or abandonment in favour of better ones. Religious people who like permanence, find this all too difficult. Yet their permanent answers are utter conjecture at best and fantasy at worst, so what makes them so attached to them?

The scientific explanation of the operational level of existence is actually also an imaginary world. That is why Kant called it noumenal, pertaining to thought. But unlike fantasy, and religious speculation, it does not allow free license to the imagination. Fairies, dragons, demons and souls are not indiscriminately admitted to it. Whatever is proposed for the operational level of the world has consequences in the phenomenal level that can be observed as phenomena, and therefore used to test the hypotheses. The world of pure thoughts, of imagination, is vast, bigger even than Nature since mortals can be immortal, and horses as well as pigs can fly in the imagination. The imagination can create the impossible, and that is why the operational world is not the world of pure imagination, but of the imagination subject to it producing phenomena that can be observed. The supernatural is possible in the imagination, but in the operational world, however fantastic and counter intuitive some idea might be, it must accurately predict how Nature works. In the operational world, only what explains the phenomenal world is allowed.

With the correct intuition that the phenomenal world has a noumenal world behind it, humans have made the error of allowing anything imagined to be in it, but it is not so. Science is interested in boundaries, in limits within which something is true. It is not true that everything is possible. The impossible is weeded out by reference to phenomena.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.